I found so much in the archives at The Milwaukee County Historical Society. It's been hard to know which to dive into and share first, but after thoroughly looking through the scans Michael sent me, I landed on one small newspaper clipping, glued inside of an very old guestbook.
What struck me first was the title:
"Milwaukee Hotelmen Divided About Letting Women Smoke."
Then my eyes dropped to the smaller bold text between the two paragraphs:
"May Smoke at Pfister."
So I did some digging. A few things I found:
The clipping was undated, but I knew the manager, Ray Smith, had been made manager after working 15 years as a bellboy. Turns out that's exactly right: Smith started as a bellboy at the Pfister in 1896 and was promoted to manager in 1911.
Another clipping glued onto the same scrapbook page even announces the promotion itself. Smith didn't become owner until years later, when Charles Pfister sold him the hotel in 1927 after suffering a stroke. (I'd originally thought it was Guido Pfister who handed it over, but Guido was Charles's father, and he'd died back in 1889.)
Since the clipping still calls him "Manager Ray Smith," not owner, that narrows the window: it was published sometime between 1911 and 1927.
Public smoking was never actually illegal for women in this era, but it was heavily restricted by custom. Women could smoke in their own rooms, or in spaces specifically set aside for them, but stepping into a public dining room or café with a cigarette was a different matter entirely. Cities like Chicago and New York, along with places overseas in Europe, had already loosened up. For a lot of women, smoking in public wasn't just a habit, it was a small, rebellious claim on space that had always belonged to men, a way of signaling independence at a moment when so few were available to them.
Milwaukee's hotel managers had to weigh in, and their answers tell you a lot:
The Pfister (Manager Ray Smith): Women may smoke in the fern room or café, "when properly escorted and under proper conditions."
Schlitz Hotel (Manager C.C. Randolph): No smoking in the restaurant, full stop. Women elsewhere might be permitted, "but we do not permit them to smoke in the restaurant."
Plankinton House / Gargoyle (Manager H. Stanley Green): Hasn't come up yet, and he's not eager to find out. "I'm not going to cross that bridge until I get to it."
College Inn (Manager William H. Morris): No personal objection, but public sentiment in Milwaukee is against it, so the answer is still no.
What gets me is that not one of these men says smoking is wrong. Nobody's making a moral argument. It's all "that's not how it's done here," or "I don't want to be the one who changes it first."
That's why a lot of progress fails to move (or moves painfully slow). You see it with racism, sexism, even harmless norms (work from home, mental health days, paternity leave, etc.).
Sadly, progress is often a victim of our desire to not rock the boat, even when we know something is morally wrong or inconsistent. And it's uncomfortable how familiar that still feels today.
Smoking is unhealthy, of course, we know that now. But at the time, for a woman, lighting a cigarette in public wasn't really about the cigarette. It was symbolic. And Ray Smith, manager of The Pfister Hotel, was one of the first in Milwaukee to move the needle.
Newspaper clipping courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society archives, with thanks to Michael Barera for materials facilitation. Learn more about the Society's collections at milwaukeehistory.net.